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Ping: Fyodor

Information Security isn't the only standby celebrating its 10th birthday. Nmap, the popular open source security scanner and network mapping tool, hit double digits in 2007 as well. Like so many projects of its kind, Nmap was a labor of love--and necessity--according to its creator, hacker Fyodor. FYODOR What inspired you to write Nmap, and what were your early expectations? Nmap was mostly written during the summer of 1997, which I spent in Baltimore working as a teaching assistant at Johns Hopkins University. They set me up in a dorm room with Ethernet connectivity, giving me a new network to explore. At the time, I had a directory full of port scanners, such as Strobe for connect scanning, Reflscan for SYN scanning, and the UDP scanner from SATAN. I hacked them all to add options and features, but still found them frustrating to use. So I decided to write my own dream port scanner which would be faster, and support all the scan types and options I wanted. After months of work and testing, Nmap replaced my other port scanners...